Life Stories

One thing that stands out about this collection is its narrative scope. It’s on display in the first quartet of stories, which explore the beginning and ultimate end of an affair between William and Clare, best friends married to other people.

Each of these stories begins in the middle of things, making it easy to overlook the fact that Bloom is telling a wide-ranging tale. Conventionally major moments—divorces, weddings, funerals—are quickly dispatched; instead these stories of two lives, and then of just one life, are told in the small spaces.

Bloom has a fine eye for emotional particularity—like how seeing your ill and infirm lover padding around in “backless bedroom slippers and green baggy pants” would make you feel equal parts pity and disgust. Or how two characters can say one thing (and mean it) and then suddenly and finally feel the opposite:

“We’ve been lucky. So far,” William says. “We really have.” Clare lies down again, her head in William’s lap, her feet up on the sofa’s arm. William looks down into her eyes, unsmiling, and she looks away.

As she reminds us with William’s “unsmiling” eyes—these aren’t minor stories about minor moments. In response to our questions, Bloom says that love is the subject that has taken hold of her. And, of course, it’s in the title and all over these stories. But it’s a particular kind of love, what we might call “mature love,” both in terms of the characters’ age, and in the way they love, which is deeply, seriously. Love here is never adolescent or silly or absurd. It is not incidental that it’s called “adultery” when you’re a grownup, and cheating when you’re a kid.

In these four stories, love feels a lot like fate, and is tied closely to death. Throughout their affair, William suffers from various ailments (heart attacks, gout; he’s at once growing in size and decaying); the narrative seems to plan for his death from the beginning, and when it comes, it’s elided in the author’s typical fashion. In our interview, Bloom also says that, “Everyone who lives, ages.” And so it’s also true that everyone who lives, and loves, dies.

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